Sunday, December 14, 2014

Arista Networks announced an enhanced version of its EOS (Extensible Operating System) that allows customers to take advantage of pre-built and custom EOS applications as well as integration with a wide range of technology partner solutions from A10 Networks, Ansible, Aruba, Cloudera, Nuage, Palo Alto Networks, Puppet Labs, Pure Storage, Red Hat, Splunk, VMTurbo, VMware and Zscaler.

The company said its EOS+ allows for rapid deployment using DevOps models and integration with the network as a whole, for reduced operational costs and deployment timeframes. The idea is to allow compute, storage and application teams to integrate with the network, leveraging the Linux and programmatic foundations of EOS. Provisioning, monitoring and dynamic reconfiguration based on application workloads can now be integrated with the network in a programmatic fashion.
Key attributes:

EOS SDK – a development framework that allows native access to all levels of EOS for custom development and integration with forwarding and routing stacks that leverage advanced features such as MPLS.

vEOS - a virtual machine instance of EOS that includes the same control plane and management plane as the physical switches.

EOS Applications – Pre-built integration with technology partners and DevOps systems such as Puppet and Splunk for provisioning and monitoring.

EOS Consulting Services – Professional services for development of customized solutions for network automation.

“As part of our work to connect billions of people around the world, we are building a network infrastructure that is more flexible, more scalable, and more efficient than almost anything else out there,” said Najam Ahmad, Vice President of Infrastructure at Facebook. “Arista EOS has proven to be a valuable component of our current designs, providing us with a series of useful features, including better control-plane and data-path programmability, the ability to write traffic steering and monitoring applications that integrate with Sysdb and the entire EOS stack running on our Arista devices, and an SDK framework is fairly easy to develop and test our code in. All this allows us to have more visibility in and greater control over our network — and that helps us continue to move fast as we scale.”

Arista also introduced the EOS SDK for developing applications that integrate directly with the switch operating system. This approach can be used for customizing IP routing, protecting against DDoS attacks through selective workflow-based filtering and analyzing data for fine-grained visibility.